Consumerism. test yourself

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

In a modern market society, where everything is bought and sold, people are just engaged in competing - which of them is more like a bird with a bushy tail. Moreover, all kinds of "show-off" act as "feathers" - branded clothes, accessories, fashionable appliances, gadgets, etc.

The essence of the human peacock was captured by the writer Jack Kerouac back in the 1950s, at the dawn of the formation of a consumer society. His aphorism subsequently spread widely in films, books and the global Internet:

Too many people are now spending money they didn't earn on things they don't need to impress people they don't like.

The very phenomenon of the so-called "consumerism" was predicted by V. I. Lenin, who, analyzing where capitalism is heading, suggested two possible options: either it will “devour itself” due to the crisis of overproduction, or it will learn to instill among the “cattle” a desire to buy junk that it does not need.

Which path capitalism has taken, we all perfectly see. Advertising aggressively climbs into all spheres of our life, in movies, books, the Internet, and even on playgrounds for preschoolers [did you see these swings and slides with an advertisement for an oil company?].

Everything is on sale - from airplanes to the "AIDSometer" ["a stylish gadget that supposedly allows you to determine the presence of HIV in a person at a distance] or bracelets with which muscles swing by themselves. They even sell air, in cans with the words "Air of St. Petersburg" or "Air of Altai Mountains".

For childless people, they even invented a doll that "can not only cry, but also poop and write, her temperature rises, she blinks her eyes, and even outwardly it is practically indistinguishable from a living baby, if not to look closely, of course" …

How do you, for example, such a service as a "friend for rent"? The agency for "renting friends" will provide you with the most suitable interlocutor or accompanying person, comedian or party-goer, psychologist or tour guide, dance partner or shopping companion who will accompany you for a small reward. By the same principle, by the way, they “sell” the time of men who, at the right time, will play “dad” for the child of a single mother.

So, what is “consumerism”? This is the identification of the core of your self-esteem with the quantity or value of things that you acquire. The more or more expensive you buy, the cooler you are.

In scientific and pseudo-scientific works there is a term - "status consumption" or "conspicuous consumption", which describes behavior when a person bought something prestigious from his point of view, and demonstrates this to everyone around him. Such behavior in the eyes of a conspicuous consumer should serve to maintain the image of a "prosperous person", "a successful man", etc. and arouse envy among others. The very "well-being" as such objectively does not exist. There is only a concept, an idea of "well-being", which is formed in a given specific society at a given specific time. Just as it used to be prestigious to have a Hungarian service [which everyone is getting rid of now], a VCR and a Lada of the latest model [to say nothing of a Volga], now this has been replaced by other attributes of a “beautiful life”. The essence remains the same.

Images of "luxury and respect" are cultivated in society artificially, with the help of propaganda tools, and serve the purpose of enriching those who order propaganda. One of the most popular methods of suggestion is constant repetition. As the Reich Minister of Education and Propaganda of Germany, Dr. Goebbels: "A lie repeated a thousand times becomes true."

That is, if an average person many times a day is hammered in from the TV screen, from the radio, from the gloss and the Internet: “if you don’t have an apple phone, a car, or various expensive items, then you’re a sucker and insignificance, you will not be respected and you won’t find yourself partner ", sooner or later he will go to buy" show-offs "so as not to look dull against the background of others. And for a while he will be happy to buy [until its new model comes out].

In Mother Russia and in developing countries, the cult of the Things blooms in a magnificent color, in pursuit of "likes" and false values, people earn themselves neuroses. It is not surprising that a person is afraid to "lag behind life" and "live worse than people." Didn't take out a mortgage, do you live with your parents? - a laughing stock! Are you over 30 and no Lexus? - sad shit in life! The girl does not have a mink coat, Dolce boots, a handbag and gadgets from Louis Vuitton - wow, what a bastard !? Didn't buy your woman an expensive car? - a rag, not a man! As an example, we can cite young men who sincerely worry that without a personal car, girls [those who are popularly called “easy virtue”] will not pay attention to them, and experiencing inner torment about this. Further, they take out a loan for a car and from now on they dine on Chinese noodles every day.

But a few years ago, the entire Internet spread the story of how a 17-year-old Chinese man sold a kidney to buy himself an "apple phone" of the then latest model.

The people in Asian countries are especially sensitive to technical innovations. In January 2012, an illustrative incident took place in Beijing. A new model of their device was expected to be sold in the Apple store. On the first day of sales, the store was crowded with hundreds of people wanting to purchase a product. Some flew there from Tibet and remote regions of the country. The management of the store, having estimated the number of those who gathered, considered that the desired goods would not be enough for everyone and announced the postponement of the day of sales. Furious Chinese began throwing stones at the store and riots, which the police had to disperse.

Our neighbors in the Western Hemisphere are not lagging behind in insanity. “The year 2011 will be remembered by Americans for the fact that on Thanksgiving evening, on the eve of Black Friday [the day of general sales and discounts], a woman in Los Angeles, in a packed Wall Mart department store, took a can of pepper gas from her purse and began to sprinkle it in the faces of the customers around her to disorient them and get hold of the discounted product she liked. And it's not a joke. 20 people were injured in her attack”[from news report].

If before the beginning of the last century luxury goods were purchased by people from the higher castes of society, now, with the development of infrastructure, "consumerism" has spread to the poor and the middle class. It is they who in the bulk buy items that are inadequate to their earnings, various bells and whistles, whistles and pipes, Bentleys on credit, etc. However, you will notice that many rich people look and behave in a simple way. For example, remember how the now revered Steve Jobs dressed. Some would argue that pop stars and famous actors wear brands. Yes, but they get paid to advertise. “Smart people don't read gloss, they publish it,” as one of the characters in the film “Gloss” said.

Chasing things is akin to a squirrel running in a wheel. No matter how much a person buys, he will always want to buy more or more expensive, no matter how much he earns - it will seem to him that he earns little. Advertising will constantly shit into the soul of the layman, cultivating his complexes, pressing on greed, explaining to him that he is not cool enough, healthy, handsome, that he is unhappy without certain purchases. And if we take into account that goods are specially produced so that they serve a short-lived [because it is economically profitable, there is even such a phenomenon - “planned obsolescence”], and the changing fashion “devalues” things faster than they fail, chase “show-off” "Is the same as running somewhere without a destination.

The “successful person” brand is just an invention imposed for someone's selfish purposes. Again, from whose point of view is "success" here? “Successful people” are essentially those who constantly bring profit to producers of goods / services. Do they themselves feel satisfied? For a while, yes, but after a lot of killed years, training and commodity fetishism, they understand that YOU DID NOT BECOME A "SUCCESSFUL MAN" SUSPENDED CARROT.

How to protect yourself from consumerism?

Nobody urges you to give up your car, mobile phone, throw off your clothes, wear sheets on your body instead, and leave to study Buddhism. The above does not mean at all that you need to leave your job and go to booking services or glass container recycling managers. Money itself is neither good nor bad. You just should not put them at the head of your life and live from buying to buying some items, even if they are considered respectable.

Remember how you felt when you bought something expensive? How long did they last? Where did they go then? Understand that no one thing can make you happy; sooner or later it will go out of order or out of fashion. Personal happiness and wealth are not always compatible with each other, for the reason that over time the latter becomes boring and becomes commonplace. History knows many cases of suicide of very wealthy people, one of the most recent - with the multibillionaire Adolf Merkle, who in 2007 ranked 5th in the list of the richest people in Germany. As a result of his unsuccessful trading on the stock exchange, his fortune was reduced to $ 8 billion, and he decided to commit suicide by throwing himself under a train on January 5, 2009.

To get out of the influence of consumerism, it is necessary to refuse contacts with its "sources of infection": TV, radio, news, press [with the exception of specialized publications on interests and hobbies]. You should also stop judging people on the principle of "who has more feathers", and you yourself should stop being allocated with property.

A person who wants to end feeding the consumer's car with ineffective waste of money should reorient his financial expenses from shopping “what's fashionable” to “what is necessary / what you like” and to things with “bare functionality”, as well as stop getting dubious, akin to a drug addict., the pleasure of "shopping".

Do not buy branded things, and if you have already bought it, carefully wipe it off, peel it off, destroy the corporate logo so that it cannot be seen. After all, you gave the money for the thing itself, and you were not paid to wear someone else's advertisement.